If my experience in non-federal government is any guide, they have similar requirements when they use the card, the difference is that it is after the fact and if the application gets rejected, the payment is the employee’s responsibility. The amount of red tape is the same either way, but with the caed the red tape happens after the purchase.

With the card, the urgent next-day-delivery order is already on its way while the red tape waits for approval. And the worker enters the order into the supplier's website directly.

With a standard order, the urgent order is entered into Oracle Financials, waiting for approval, and some time during office hours in the next 1-2 days someone in finance will copy the order into the supplier's website, omitting one order line by accident.

The federal government actually operates in the opposite way. They cosign a credit card under your name, you have to pay it off at the end of every month, and they reimburse you after the fact.

That's pretty much the mechanism of acheiving the effect that I was describing on State governments I’ve seen, too. I was just trying to generalize on the level of responsibility, rather than detailed payment flow.

You have quite the imagination. Your fantasy of Musk's competence is unmoored from reality

So, remove the checks and balances that were already put in place over decades to make sure employees are spending responsibly. Um, sure.

With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.

Do you shut down your entire business before rolling out a new system?

If you want to save money and remove bureaucracy, you first create a system, then migrate to it and sort out issues, then remote the old system. Now it's going to take months to get something new in place, while also juggling manual approvals and getting things through payment systems individually.

Wouldn't it be prudent to do that before rolling out such a change?

while you imagine this, let's waste order of magnitudes more in red tape, that is if your imagination and DOGE's imagination are in the same place.

Re-discovering why things worked the way they did (waste, corruption, and fraud prevention) is gonna be fun.

You think they would have mentioned that in the memo if they were.